Over 36 million Americans currently suffer from significant hearing loss. Numerous diseases and traumas can cause conductive hearing loss. Prevalent among these are: Cholesteotoma (bone/joint degeneration of the middle ear bones), mechanical trauma (exposure to exceedingly loud sounds), and barotraumas (exposure to the shock front of an explosive blast or supersonic projectile).
Various types of ear implant surgeries have been developed to facilitate the mitigation or treatment of hearing loss. Some of these surgeries involve the installation of prosthetic implants into the middle ear of patients suffering from hearing loss. In some cases, implant surgeries are conducted and the placement of the prosthesis ends up being less than ideal, so that the implantation surgery needs to be repeated for improved placement. Unfortunately, there are no current long-term criteria in place for evaluation of prosthesis efficacy. Moreover, there are currently no intraoperative measures to predict post-operative prosthesis efficacy. Thus, rates of revision surgery for functional failure have recently been noted as being as high as 18%. However, it is possible that the actual rates at which unsuccessful surgeries are performed could be much higher (e.g., as much as three times higher by some estimates) based on the willingness of some patients to opt out of further surgeries in favor of just dealing with the hearing loss issues.
Accordingly, there is a need to develop an ability to monitor the effective placement of prosthetic implants during the surgical procedures in order to improve outcomes for patients.